Pleasantville

I got home the other night and was talking to my wife about some of my frustrations at the office. As with many companies this one has a fairly well entrenched culture in which the vast majority of employees have never worked anywhere else. The result is a fairly narrow perspective and a serious case of "not invented here" syndrome. In the mix are a small group of us who have a great deal of outside experience and a much broader perspective. For the most part we are all frustrated. After talking for a while, my wife looked at me and said, "You're working in Pleasantville" (the movie where everyone is in black and white until a couple of new characters enter the picture in bright technicolor). That hit the nail on the head - technicolor people versus black & white culture.

The beauty of it is that I had the pleasure of watching several people in a meeting yesterday turn from B&W to technicolor in the course of about ten minutes. This meeting was with a new executive, whom I hadn't met before, but who was obviously already in technicolor from the moment we first started talking. I don't think the other four people in the room said a word for the first forty five minutes while he and I talked passionately about such things as vision, and opportunity and stories and values and customer successes. By the end of the meeting the entire room was glowing.

New goal added to my list - Bring Technicolor Perspective to an otherwise Black & White world.